jamie writes: "'Last Monday, I was asked by a journalist whether a claim in a new report from a small NGO made any sense.... The press response to their study has therefore been almost totally dominated by the error at the beginning of the report, rather than the substance of their work on the impacts. This public relations debacle has lessons for NGOs, the press, and the public.'"

jamie writes: "StarCraft, one of the most popular games ever made, also serves as the perfect proving ground for artificial intelligence. Here's the inside story of how a Berkeley team won the world's first StarCraft AI competition with code that can beat even pro-level human players."

jamie writes: "Our reaction to the music that we love stimulates the flow of dopamine into certain sections of the brain, concludes a new study out of McGill University. The findings "help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies," the scientists note."

jamie writes: "A NOAA preliminary analysis reports that 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year of the global surface temperature record, beginning in 1880. This was the 34th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th century average — 0.62 +/- 0.07 C above, to be precise. It was the wettest year on record too, according to the Global Historical Climatology Network."

jamie writes: "As some of you may have heard, the incoming Republican majority in Congress has a new initiative called YouCut, which lets ordinary Americans like me propose government programs for termination. So imagine how excited I was to learn that YouCut’s first target — yes, its first target — was that notoriously bloated white elephant, the National Science Foundation."

jamie writes: "It's the timesaver of the century. 'Tired of arguing with climate change deniers in 140 character quips, the programmer wrote a script to do it for him. Chatbot @AI_AGW scans Twitter every five minutes searching for hundreds of phrases that fit the usual denier argument paradigm. Then it serves them up some science... Those who claim the entire solar system is warming are met with something like: 'Sun’s output has barely changed since 1970 & is irrelevant to recent global warming' followed by a link to corresponding scientific research.' Finally this guy can go to bed."

jamie writes: "In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of 'scare quotes' to ensure that it's clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever."